Malate dehydrogenase (MDH) and citrate synthase (CS) are two pacemaking enzymes involved in the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle. Oxaloacetate (OAA) molecules are the intermediate substrates that are transferred from the MDH to CS to carry out sequential catalysis. It is known that, to achieve a high flux of intermediate transport and reduce the probability of substrate leaking, a MDH-CS metabolon forms to enhance the OAA substrate channeling. In this study, we aim to understand the OAA channeling within possible MDH-CS metabolons that have different structural orientations in their complexes. Three MDH-CS metabolons from native bovine, wild-type porcine, and recombinant sources, published in recent work, were selected to calculate OAA transfer efficiency by Brownian dynamics (BD) simulations and to study, through electrostatic potential calculations, a possible role of charges that drive the substrate channeling. Our results show that an electrostatic channel is formed in the metabolons of native bovine and recombinant porcine enzymes, which guides the oppositely charged OAA molecules passing through the channel and enhances the transfer efficiency. However, the channeling probability in a suggested wild-type porcine metabolon conformation is reduced due to an extended diffusion length between the MDH and CS active sites, implying that the corresponding arrangements of MDH and CS result in the decrease of electrostatic steering between substrates and protein surface and then reduce the substrate transfer efficiency from one active site to another.

Inhibition of the protein-protein interaction (PPI) mediated by breast-cancer-gene 1 C-terminal (BRCT) is an attractive strategy to sensitize breast and ovarian cancers to chemotherapeutic agents that induce DNA damage. Such inhibitors could also be used for studies to understand the role of this PPI in DNA damage response. However, design of BRCT inhibitors is challenging because of the inherent flexibility associated with this domain. Several studies identified short phosphopeptides as tight BRCT binders. Here we investigated the thermodynamic properties of 18 phosphopeptides or peptide with phosphate mimic and three compounds with phosphate groups binding to BRCT to understand promiscuous molecular recognition and guide inhibitor design. We performed molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to investigate the interactions between inhibitors and BRCT and their dynamic behavior in the free and bound states. MD simulations revealed the key role of loops in altering the shape and size of the binding site to fit various ligands. The mining minima (M2) method was used for calculating binding free energy to explore the driving forces and the fine balance between configuration entropy loss and enthalpy gain. We designed a rigidified ligand, which showed unfavorable experimental binding affinity due to weakened enthalpy. This was because it lacked the ability to rearrange itself upon binding. Investigation of another phosphate group containing compound, C1, suggested that the entropy loss can be reduced by preventing significant narrowing of the energy well and introducing multiple new compound conformations in the bound states. From our computations, we designed an analog of C1 that introduced new intermolecular interactions to strengthen attractions while maintaining small entropic penalty. This study shows that flexible compounds do not always encounter larger entropy penalty, compared with other more rigid binders, and highlights a new strategy for inhibitor design.